


permanently fleeting

by shcherbatskayas



Series: a different breed of star [1]
Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Alternate Universe - Idols, Crushes, F/M, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-13 07:01:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12978618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shcherbatskayas/pseuds/shcherbatskayas
Summary: "He wonders if maybe Peko has infected his brain, wonders if maybe she’s a parasite of some sort. He doesn’t know, but he thinks that she’s more of a ghost than a bug. Still, he isn’t sure.He desperately wants to find out."





	permanently fleeting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thewildwilds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewildwilds/gifts).



> Anh and I were talking about an Idol AU and I got super into it, so I wrote this in between my frantic updating of "surrender on no sides." ^^ I may love mp100, but I'm always gonna be an sdr2 gal at heart. Let me knkw what you think and thanks for reading!

It starts off normally. Fuyuhiko is sitting at the autograph table with the rest of the band, sandwiched in between Kazuichi and Rantaro as per usual because they both have enough personality to distract from his moodiness and are also two of the five people he can actually stand being around for more than ten minutes. He hates this part of being an idol the most: sitting there and having to pretend to like his fans, pretend like he’s a good person, pretend like he’s anything more than an asshole who likes to sing and thrives off of positive attention like it’s the sun and he’s some greedy, desperate, disgusting little weed who’ll kill everything around him to get more of it. His fans are fickle and annoying and hate him for the piece of shit he really is, and so the managers do their best to hide him. They mostly succeed. Fuyuhiko doesn’t mind that they do that because he’s not really looking for fake compliments on his shitty personality from anyone, especially not their managers. He’s just looking for people to say how much they like his performances. The problems start when people try and go beyond that, and it seems like they _always_ try and go beyond that. 

Tonight, they’re in Amagasaki, a small-ish city not too far from Osaka, which is their next big stop. This is a skippable place, a place he’ll barely think about again--there are no consequences here--and so as he signs autographs, his carelessness gets to him. He almost makes one girl cry with his bored, listless expression and an out-of-place group of women who have to be in their thirties at the very least give him pitying looks and start talking to him about Natsumi and their pitying looks get worse when he tells them to shut the fuck up, to keep his sister’s name out of their mouths, to get lost before he _makes_ them get lost.

(He can still see the headline when he closes his eyes: _Concert pianist and sister of pop star Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu found dead in Kobe._ Any time someone brings it up, he feels the same confusion, the same reckless anger, the same eye-watering fury that he pretends is fury so that he doesn’t actually start crying that he felt when he first saw it. It’s been three months. He still feels like it happened three hours ago.) 

The next group comes up in line. His head is starting to throb, the beginning of a migraine blooming behind his eyes. He’ll have to ask Makoto if he has any Tylenol later. They look about his age--fifteen, he figures, give or take a year on either side--and they’re still in school uniforms that proudly announce that they’re students of Hisako’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies. Later, much later, he’ll discover that it’s a charity school: orphans and other wards of the state and girls with parents who can’t make ends meet all find a spot there, but the name sounds pretentious as all hell and so he assumes that they’re private school kids, spoiled rotten and expecting their heroes to be real heroes instead of what they are: teenage boys who need a break. 

One of them approaches him. She’s tall and her limbs are a little awkward, waiting patiently for her to grow into them before they’ll look like they belong. Her silvery hair is tied into two neat braids, and he’s struck by the utter ridiculousness of her because she’s wearing glasses, but she’s also wearing red colored contacts. They have to be contacts because no one naturally has eyes like that, cherry-red and searching, and so it’s ridiculous that she tries to pretend like that it’s natural. She’s ridiculous. They’re all so ridiculous. 

“Hello.” She begins, palpably excited in a shy way that he’s seen a hundred times as she passes him a piece of her schoolwork to sign, possibly the only piece of paper she had on her as she made her way to the concert. Her name is written at the top of it in neat, princess-like handwriting: Peko Pekoyama. He looks at it and scoffs.

“Peko Pekoyama.” He says, shaking his head. “Your parents must’ve hated you a lot, huh?”

She blinks at him once. There’s something like a fog over her face disguising the intensity of her emotions, but beneath it, she looks like he reached over the table and smacked her across the face. Fuyuhiko can half see the expression, but the gray is thick and captivating, almost an expression in itself. “I suppose so.” She says, her voice giving away a hint of hurt so subtle that his ears almost skip right over it. Everything about her seems subdued, somehow, like she’s actively thinking about how to make herself unnoticeable, totally going against the point of those those bright red contacts, which makes him that for a second that they might be real, that she might just have been born with eyes like that. 

Fuyuhiko says nothing to that, just scoffs again and writes his name over the math in bright green pen, dominating the whole page. Next to him, he can hear Rantaro talking to two girls in the same uniform as Peko, an excitable girl with with pink and blue streaks all through her hair who has almost smacked Peko in the head with her sweeping hand gestures three times in half as many minutes and an equally loud girl who won’t stop eating popcorn because she’s either that hungry or that rude. They’re talking nonsense about homework and a blog and a train ride and what they did on the train ride and his headache is getting worse by the second. Their voices are grating on his nerves, nails on the chalkboard of every neuron he has, and he can’t stop himself from saying something. 

“Won’t you two shut the fuck up? God, you’re both so _annoying._ ” Fuyuhiko shoots a comment their way, squinting at them in a weaker version of his normal glare because the cameras are all in his eyes and the lights are actively hurting him. 

He doesn’t see much of their reactions, overblown and dramatic and par for the course, doesn’t see Rantaro smoothing it over like always, because his attention forced back in front of him, back to Peko.

The hurt has turned to anger. Her shoulders are straight, her limbs look like they belong to her body now, her glare is fiercer than his could ever dream of being, she looks stoic and cool and ready to annihilate and he has to wonder if maybe there was some mistake in the order of the world because this girl must be a samurai, must have a sword in her soul because he’s only ever seen that look in old paintings littering his half-read history textbooks. “You know, you’re not better than anyone.”

It’s Fuyuhiko’s turn to blink at her now, because, uh, yes, he is. He’s a member of Japan’s third most popular boy band. He sings like an angel. He has a flock of fans, stupid and supportive but his, and this girl is supposed to be a part of that. He’s better than a lot of people. He has a whole list of people he’s better than, and he’ll be more than happy to list if off for her. Before he can say anything, she goes on. 

“You don’t get to just treat my friends like that because you’re in a popular band. You should apologize.” The way she says that last part, that _You should apologize_ , sounds more like an order than a suggestion, and that’s what does it. Fuyuhiko hates being ordered around, hates it more than anything else because fuck her, he knows what he’s doing, he knows what he should or shouldn’t do, and he’s not going to let this girl push her ideas onto him. 

“Who are you to tell me what I should do, huh?!” He glares up at her properly, but the look doesn’t even make her blink. “Maybe your friends shouldn’t be so bothersome. I’ve had to deal with five hundred of you pieces of shit tonight, and they’ve somehow managed to be the most annoying of all of them. It’s almost impressive, really. A moralistic bitch and her entourage of idiots. You guys must be real popular at school.”

Peko looks at him. Looks at the paper sitting between them. Looks back up at him, all but grabbing his eyes and staring into them. She picks up the paper, folds it half and then in fourths and then in eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds. Then, passionlessly passionate and methodically impulsive, she rips the homework up into miniscule pieces and blows them into his face like she’s blowing him a kiss. 

Before he can recover his senses and scream at her, she’s gone, almost like she was never there at all. 

***

The next day, Fuyuhiko can’t stop thinking about her. Can’t stop complaining about her to Makoto, the only one nice enough to tolerate his ramblings about this girl at eight in the morning. 

“And then she ripped up the paper! Right in front of me! And blew it in my face!” He exclaims for the fifth time in five hours, miming her motions for extra emphasis. “I’ve never seen such a bitchy move in my life!”

“...It does seem a little mean of her to do that, but it doesn’t sound like you were that nice to her, either.” Makoto tells him, making a point of not looking right at him, but a little to his left. 

As Fuyuhiko goes through his list of reasons of why it was totally acceptable for him to do that (Her name really is ridiculous and his head hurt like a motherfucker and her friends were annoying, they were super annoying, Rantaro will tell him if Makoto won’t believe him, but most of all, it boiled down to this: he hated it. He hated having to pretend.), he feels something weird happen in his chest, something that feels like guilt but can’t be guilt because he’s done nothing wrong.

“I don’t know if that makes it right, though. You wouldn’t have done that to a girl on the street.” Makoto counters and Fuyuhiko knows he’s right, but he won’t admit to it. He’d rather die.

***

He’s thinking about her once they get to Osaka. Thinking that maybe she bought a ticket for that show, too. Fans did that sometimes, if two shows were close enough to each other, and it isn’t that far from Amagasaki to Osaka. He spends his night looking for silver braids and searching eyes and elbows with an edge. 

He finds nothing. 

It’s disappointing. Fuyuhiko is aware that he’s weirdly disappointed that she isn’t there. He isn’t sure why. Fuyuhiko hates her, after all. She’s a bitch. He shouldn’t want to see her. 

(But he does. He does. He really, really does.)

***

He’s still talking about her next week. Mondo looks about ready to kill him while Fuyuhiko complains about her abnormally perfect handwriting for the fourth time in two days and about how that clearly proves that she’s a mistake as a human being. 

“God, why don’t you just go back to Amagasaki and make out with her?” He says, tuning his guitar absently. 

“Why the hell would I do that?!” Fuyuhiko asks, genuinely offended by that statement. Why would he want to kiss Peko Pekoyama? She isn’t pretty, she isn’t nice, she isn’t even remotely kissable in any way. He can think of a hundred girls better than her that he saw in Amagasaki alone. 

“Uh, because you’re clearly crushing on her?” Mondo tells him, getting himself nothing but a headlock for his trouble. 

Fuyuhiko knows he’s wrong and explains exactly why he’s wrong while ruffling Mondo’s hair with a violent friendliness, enjoying how pissed he gets about it. But his justifications start to sound weak to his own ears, start to sound like a quiet “I suppose so” from someone’s finely-shaped mouth.

***

In quieter moments, two or three weeks later, he’s still thinking about her. Wondering about her. Wondering what songs of theirs she likes, wondering what she’s up to, wondering what the hell makes her think she can talk to him like that, wondering if she even listens to their music anymore.

Before he falls asleep, he wonders if maybe Peko has infected his brain, wonders if maybe she’s a parasite of some sort. He doesn’t know, but he thinks that she’s more of a ghost than a bug. Still, he isn’t sure. 

He desperately wants to find out. 

***

Fuyuhiko determines that Peko’s eye color is natural after not thinking about her for three days because he meets a girl in Sendai with red-colored contacts and her eyes are nothing like Peko’s, nothing like that intense gaze surrounded by subtle black liner. She doesn’t have to fake any sort of intensity or mystery like this girl does. Peko’s just like that on her own. 

***

He and Rantaro are sitting by a piano back in Tokyo, fiddling with keys and trying to figure out how to get it to sound the way Natsumi would’ve wanted a song written about her to sound when Rantaro says it. 

“You know, there’s a really good joke in English that I think Natsumi would’ve liked. I think Maiko would’ve liked it, too.” He begins, invoking the name of his own missing sister. Maiko’s been gone longer than Natsumi, but Maiko isn’t confirmed dead yet. Still, they all know. They’re just waiting for the official announcement at this point. 

“What is it?” He asks, curious because Natsumi’s taste in jokes were either insanely cheesy or insanely violent and he misses hearing them. 

In textbook English, Rantaro tells him. “The Nile isn’t just a river in Egypt.”

Cheesy, then. Fuyuhiko groans and places his head on the keys, making a ceaseless chord that Natsumi could’ve named but he can’t, he never could, and he never will be able to. 

“I think she would’ve said it to you around now.” Rantaro says. 

“I’m not in denial about anything.” Defensive, weak, obvious. Fuyuhiko is almost ashamed of himself.

And then a chuckle from somewhere to his left and three notes in a row, cheerful and teasing before there’s a hand on his shoulder. “Sure you’re not, buddy. Sure you’re not.”

***

Fuyuhiko accepts that he probably has a crush on Peko when he’s hearing Kazuichi talk about Sonia for the eighteenth time that day and realizes that half of the things he’s saying about Sonia are things he’s thinking about Peko. 

He’s thinking about her face though a fog and her neat handwriting and how she defends her friends without hesitation and about how she’s clever enough to get into a decent private school from wherever she was before and he tries desperately to use some of those facts to spin her into something awful, but he can’t. He just can’t.

***

The tabloids notice that Fuyuhiko is being nicer to fans. They wonder why. He offers no answer, but the answer is this: He’s realized that they’re all people with feelings of their own and he can’t just stomp on them because they’d let him get away with it most of the time. He can thank Peko for that, wherever she is now. 

(He wonders where she is now. He hopes she’s doing well.)

***

Fuyuhiko knows he should go home when the tour ends. He really should. He should go home with his family and mourn, but he’s always hated his family and Natsumi hated them even worse and half of the reason he likes traveling so much is because it gets him out of his house and away from his parent’s overarching, poisonous reach. He only steps foot in Kobe when he absolutely must. 

He has options. He can stay at the highrise in Tokyo that his parents bought for business, he can crash with Kazuichi or Makoto or Mondo (Rantaro has too many siblings to even consider staying there), or he can go somewhere else for a few weeks. 

Fuyuhiko opts for somewhere else. He goes for a city, not one that’s too big but big enough that he can hide if he needs to and close enough to a larger one if he needs to do something important. He doesn’t want anything touristy, doesn’t want to go somewhere where too many people will recognize him, doesn’t want to be within fifty kilometers of Kobe. 

His specifications lead him back to Amagasaki. Fuyuhiko figured that would happen. 

He wants to see Peko again. He knew that when he started looking through places. He isn’t sure why, but he wants to. He doesn’t know what exactly about her captivated him, what combination of traits caused this restless curiosity and odd affection for a girl he had one conversation with, but the urge to see her again is overwhelming. It feels like he’ll drown on dry land if he doesn’t at least catch another glimpse of her. He misses straight shoulders and awkward limbs and searching eyes and faces through a fog. He misses it like he misses a bruise won in a losing fight, misses it like a mole that was removed for the sake of perfect skin, misses it like any beautifully ugly truth is missed. 

Fuyuhiko doesn’t plan for anything expensive. He opts for the cheap seats on the train, goes for a hotel that’s not the best but certainly not the worst hotel in town, and he doesn’t expect to buy too many things. Fuyuhiko has more than enough already. 

Before he loses his courage, he packs his bags. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting from this, knows that he probably won’t see her at all, but he has to try anyhow. Fuyuhiko absolutely has to.

So he gets on the train, and he goes.


End file.
